Brevity of a Moment
by KBRC
Summary: They never meet again, after Karachi. Sherlock bids her farewell in the cold and calloused manner he does everything, that same pragmatic indifference with which he pretends to regard the world. Irene does not believe him, not anymore Goodbye Mr Holmes (adlock)


They never meet again, after Karachi. Sherlock bids her farewell in the cold and calloused manner he does everything, that same pragmatic indifference with which he pretends to regard the world. Irene does not believe him, not anymore. He cannot pretend that what has happened between them did not mean anything, even if the chances of it happening again are only slightly more than the chances of it being a snow storm that delayed his flight out of Istanbul. In fact, the flight is not delayed at all, but he is. Irene pulls him back as he goes to shut the door of the hotel room, for she realizes what this is as well.

_Goodbye Mr Holmes. IA_

It is a goodbye, the firm finality of it reflected in each of their gestures. She had laid him bare and had him at her mercy last night, and Adleresque sort of thanks for his daring rescue. They do not move in gratitude now, but in haste, tethering each other to the bed, to the moment, to themselves just for an instant, while his flight takes off outside the window. The shadow of it momentarily darkens the room, making her skin luminescent against the navy sheets and her eyes somehow brighter as she pulls him to her again, a vicious clash of teeth and tongues.

Sherlock memorizes her then. The span of her waist beneath his long fingered hands. The dip of her hip that sharpens as she arches when he touches her just so. The flush of her chest, the desperate want of her expression, the feel of her nails on his back, the wild tumbling mane of her hair, the perfect gasping o of her mouth, and her voice. That voice, which will be, he knows, the first thing he forgets, hopefully the only thing. Sound, the hardest of memories to draw on and recreate, impossible to replicate in the mind. But he can hope.

Irene is less meticulous, single minded in her quest. But she'll remember in her own way, even years later, the slapdash cascade of images and feeling and the occasional sound, an imperfect recollection of a perfect moment.

She never buys navy sheets ever again.

_Happy new year, Ms Adler. SH_

He gets on the next flight, and Irene does not linger in the city like her heavy heart desires. She stuffs the feeling down and packs her few things, all brought by him, into a single suitcase and boards a flight. If she keeps his shirt it is merely a mishap, thrown in with her things in her haste. The fact that it remains with her longer than any other item is trivial.

Her death is dull, absent is the glittering decadence and mischief of her old life. Sometimes she idly wonders if she did something outrageous he'd come again, rescue her once more. Once, just once, she thinks she sees him, wandering among the living in the same way she does, a dead man walking. The phantom trick of her eyes angers her far too much, splinters the careful walls she has built over what remains of her heart, what he did not take when he boarded that flight and flew out of her life at jet speed.

Irene is not a fragile, sentimental creature. Sherlock did not break her, leave her reeling in his absence like a hopeless and lovesick victorian heroine. That is not a role she will ever play. If she dreams of navy sheet and errant dark curls, of long fingers over her wrists and ever changing eyes locked on hers, if she wakes up both wanting and bitter, it is of no consequence.

_I'm not dead, let's have dinner. IA_

Sherlock expects her to text him. It is vain and pompous and when he reflects on his desire (because it is, of course part desire) he feels a bit ill and rather wretched. First, because of the sheer amount of sentiment that comes with thinking of the Woman, and second because she is not the sort to pine, and it feels wrong treating her as such. Oh but he wants. He wants proof that she is still alive and wrecking havoc, that their is still a living breathing Irene out there for him to find.

But goodbye is goodbye, and this time he can't expect her to waltz back into his life as if she owns it, for death is her playground now. The hollow feeling that settles in his chest remains, carried with him as the strings of the web pull tighter about him and make it harder to breathe. His blood is sluggish and his breathing laboured, but externally he is cold and placid as always, watching the word crumble into decay with a philosopher's eyes.

_I'm thinking of sending you a Christmas Present. Mantelpiece. IA_

He escapes his arrests, sends a text to Jim Moriarty with a desperate plan, and then finds himself drawn back to Irene once more. The mistress of false deaths, she'd certainly have been an invaluable asset now. Alas, they have been incommunicado since he left her whilst she slept in that hotel room, and there is no way to contact her now.

Her first death, although he doubts it was actually her first, hit him hard, sent a shockwave through his system unlike anything he'd felt before. Sherlock wonders if Moriarty capitalized on that, on the way Irene laid his heart out and stole it, made him dance like a Voodoo doll with pins through the cloth. It is easy to imagine The Spider would, and all the more probable Jim had those same pins through Irene as well, the two of them stuck together and impaled, a macabre game.

When the gun goes off, he thinks of nothing but those pins falling out, the way they did for her with the swing of a blade and some carefully edited footage. And he jumps, he swears he hears the pins clatter to the concrete. Maybe that is just him.

_BBC1 right now. You'll laugh. IA_

It's on the news everywhere. 'Break Ins in London! Moriarty Walks Free! Trial of the Century!' it makes her skin crawl and her mind flash with worry, behind the simple mask she wears now. She had warned him, between kisses to his flesh and sighs of pleasure, that Jim had other plans, that she was only the beginning, that it would get worse.

The game is on, and Sherlock doesn't even know the rules.

Suicide of Fake Genius. She breaks at that, because she knew the rules but had no cards to play, wasn't even at the table. He cannot be dead, but he is. As she is. Spectres in the life of those living, that is what she has to believe. If he is dead, she'll have to face that heart she'd locked away, and that is not a feasible option at the moment. Irene does not cry as she watches the coverage on BBC online, she laughs. Sick rolling laughter that churns her stomach and lasts till she can't breathe, awkward hiccups of nose falling through the still, sticky air of her flat.

_Even you have got to eat. Let's have dinner. IA_

In the aftermath, she remains holed up in her flat for days, forgetting to eat and rewatching the video, reading all the coverage available online. Her heart's remains stutter in her chest, and she ignores the ache, aggravating it with a cheap bottle of wine.

A week later she moves again, just to feel alive. Impulsively takes a flight and half hopes to get caught just to feel again. Argentina is hot and busy and her spanish is stilted and awkward and she doesn't care, doesn't feel anything.

_You looked sexy on crime watch. IA_

Sherlock is too busy to peruse most of the coverage of his apparent suicide, chasing the contracting strands of the web left in it's maker's wake. But he does endeavor to keep tabs on John Watson, tells himself it's to make sure the man doesn't do anything stupid or get himself killed. It's not because he cares, god no. He never cares, no time for that anymore.

The press calls John his widow once, and it leaves Sherlock miffed for a week. And then, then he stops, just once, allows himself to feel and thinks no. No, John is not his widow. If anyone were it would be Irene, who was in his life so brief a time that Sherlock is the widower and in some twisted sense also dead himself.

He watched John's reaction to the comment on the crackling television screen in the cheap motel and groans, astounded by the wrongness of it all and the startling mess he has made.

_I'm in Egypt, talking to an idiot. Get on a plane, let's have dinner. IA_

There is no one interesting anymore. The world is flat, empty vacancies in the eyes of the passerby, like so many run down hotels. How did he not see it before? Oh, but he did. There was the work to distract him, and there was John to temper him. And then there was Irene, who he can't seem to get out of his head now. Brilliant, clever, naughty Irene, who threw him under a bus and stole his heart and brought him back, who had him on his toes and on his back and in his mind.

She was not vacant. She was so very alive and so very dynamic, a puzzle in and of herself with more mysteries than any case. So much depth, he never even got a chance to scratch the surface. And he won't now. The dinner is over and the guest have gone their separate ways, and the table is empty again.

_I like your funny hat. IA_

Something is wrong. She should be over him by now. There's no sign he's even still alive, and yet here she is, sitting with deerstalker she found at the second hand shop in her lap and strangled tears in her eyes. The wine has been upgraded to Vodka (when in Moscow…), and it is half gone. Irene is far past the point of denying that she was in love with him, and well beyond tolerating it.

But Sherlock is in her veins, poison pumping through her with every beat of her wretched heart. She used to cry like she had forgotten how, but now the hot angry tears stream unbidden and unwanted from her eyes with ease, marking her cheeks with their fleeting essence and collecting on the worn fabric of the hat.

Fleeting. As this life is, as she is, as he was.

_Oh for God's sake, let's have dinner. IA_

A year, four months and 21 days since Irene Adler died and entered this not-quite purgatory. She'd prefer hell. Sherlock is becoming an odd ghost bout her mind, popping into her thoughts and bringing a chill. The pain has subsided, mercifully, washed away and taking with it her cursory notion of sanity.

Nothing matters anymore, she's given up. Survive for the sake of surviving and nothing more. Her hands will sometimes raise in defeat although no one is watching, her iron will breaking for a moment although she herself is a strong as ever, resilient as always. It's an uncomfortable existence, tether-bound and yet wanting to break free.

_You do know the hat actually suits you, don't you? IA_

In a fit of childish petulance she burns the hat before moving yet again, watching the flames take the the fabric like some sort of satanic ritual. If she burns it, will it release her soul? Will she finally be free of him?

The fire burns too long, scorches the floor on which she'd set it. Irene burns her fingers putting it out, lets them blister as she carries her bag and flies away. She thinks she might be going mad.

_I saw you in the street today. You didn't see me. IA_

There's a woman who looks like Irene who lives in the flat next door to the one he is using as a base for the moment. A little thinner, perennially tired and far less confident, but the resemblance is there. Sherlock lets himself believe it is her. It makes it easier, makes dealing with the fact that they are so so so very over and he's somehow not okay with that. They were over before they started.

He's always had a problem with wasted potential, even as a boy. Couldn't deal with physics for the longest time, all that wasted energy and where does it go? He and Irene… a nuclear reaction reduced to a cigarette lighter. It makes him unnecessarily upset, in those moments when there is no one to hunt and no threads to pull, nothing to do but stare at the wall and listen to the woman next door through the paper thin walls of the flat. He realizes that it's not polite, wouldn't be even if she was Irene (he hasn't, can't, won't bring himself to confirm that) and is even less so if she isn't.

Suddenly Irene is everywhere, in his mind. She has stormed the palace and taken the throne, he can picture her there in perfect clarity, the iron like points of her wit cutting through the monotonous fog that had settled there.

He let's Irene remain the Queen of his palace, it makes him work faster.

_I can see tower bridge and the moon from my room. Work out where I am and join me. IA_

Without realizing it, Sherlock unravels the last of the web. He spends a week after that celebrating in his own way, searching for Irene.

The woman is mist, always has been. She slipped from his fingers years ago.

He returns to London to fanfare feeling unfulfilled. Proves his genius and resumes his work. The Queen remains on the throne, he keeps seeing her, falls for the incarnation of her in his minds eye. If John notices, he doesn't say anything, attributes it to the years away and ignores the rest. What it must be like to ignore what bothers him, Sherlock ponders, almost jealous. He just wants her to rejoice with, one who knows the pain of playing dead and the choke of the web.

_John's blog is HILARIOUS. I think he likes you more than I do. Let's have dinner. IA_

When Irene thinks it has finally passed, that a tentative equilibrium has been reached, she mistakenly listens to the BBC radio broadcast.

34 seconds into the news she flicks off the radio in her sedan, pulls over to the side of the highway and rests her head on the steering wheel. It's too much, he can't be alive. He would have found her, they would have crossed paths. With shaking hands she pulls out her phone, typing in the address for John Watson's blog. She hasn't been in years, not since the news of Sherlock's suicide. Back then she didn't believe the news either, like she doesn't now.

But there… she tosses the phone onto the passengers seat and laughs, that same mad cackle, her breath coming in gasps after minutes, her body shaking. It's uncertain if Irene is happy or sad, or maybe angry, or disappointed. There are too many emotions to make sense of, the cascade of them drowning her.

_Bored in a hotel. Join me. Let's have dinner. IA_

Oddly enough his life is still unfulfilling. Brighter, easier, as the pieces fall back into place and the cracks in the glass are repaired. John accepts him back in abject shock, which fades with time. Lestrade gets his badge back, Sherlock works with him again, albeit from a quieter position. The cases are somehow not as interesting, the splendor of the chase doesn't feel quite the same. His friends suggest it's only because he grew accustomed to unravelling the web, far more exciting work than your average serial killer. He declines to inform them that no, that was boring too.

He forgot her voice, early on. It used to sing to him, taunt his mind and play with his thoughts, he would talk to her and she would talk back, somehow more clever than him and always quick witted. But that faded.

He recalls reading somewhere that emotional memory is durable if fallible, and Irene is the most emotional of his memories. And yet her room in his mind palace begins to erode faster than all rest, the iron of the throne rusting, her image faded to a flicker in his minds eye.

_I'm not hungry, let's have dinner. IA_

They move on, the phone in the drawer remains, but he no longer lingers over it, taking it out and flipping it in his hands. She never regains her heart, but she reclaims her mind, ridding it of him save for her darkest moments. Sherlock returns to his life in London, Irene wraps death worund her like a cloak and walks the shadows.

He never replaces the throne room.

And if one day, when she's caught again, the only number she thinks of texting is his, it doesn't mean she's not over him. She does it purely for the sake of nostalgia, even if he won't be here this time.

**_Goodbye, Mr Holmes. IAxx_**

* * *

_I'm sorry. I have no idea what this is. _


End file.
